Joyce spoke with storm surge expert Carl Drews, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. Dawes says the surge was greatest at Tacloban City, where the Leyte Gulf narrows into the San Pedro and San Pablo Bay.

"That is about the worst path and the worst place for surge," Drews says.

Typhoon Haiyan was the strongest-ever tropical cyclone to make landfall, according to Jeff Masters, meteorologist and co-founder of the Weather Underground. When it smashed through the central Philippines it was generating 1-minute average winds of 195 mph, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory's Joint Typhoon Warning Center (an alternate 10-minute measure from the Japan Meteorological Agency put Haiyan's winds at 145 mph at landfall).

Those tremendous winds drove even more water ashore because sea-level rise due to climate change has been occurring four to five times faster in the eastern Philippines because trade winds and currents have been piling up more water in the western Pacific, according to William Sweet, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"Where the typhoon hit, it was relatively low ground," Thorkil Aarup, a scientist with the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission in Paris, which monitors storms and storm preparedness worldwide, tells Joyce. "It was difficult to evacuate to places where you had safe cover."